A Bad Day for Sorry

have a hole where your face was.”

Now that they were closer, the guard looked even younger. Sixteen, seventeen, with a smooth face that didn’t look like it needed shaving too often, popping out in sweat. It was clear that he was in pain, his eyes bugging out of his head, his mouth working in fear.

Stella crawled away from him and stood up. She slid her backpack off and got out the coil of rope. “I did you a favor shootin’ you where I did,” she said. “I could’ve capped your knee. Know what happens then?”

The boy shook his head, fast.

“You don’t ever walk too good, that’s what. With this hole here, you got a good shot at healing up right. You play basketball?”

The boy looked around wildly for a moment, then gave a half nod. Stella yanked his arms hard behind him while Chrissy took out the buck knife and cut off a length of the rope and handed it to her. While Stella secured the binding, Chrissy cut a second length of rope and went to work tying off his leg above the bullet entry. It was a big, messy hole, but it seemed to have missed the bone. If Chrissy was put off by the blood it didn’t show.

“Well, that’s too bad; basketball’s a shitty sport. Still, you’ll get a chance to keep playing it if you do what I tell you.”

The boy shook his head, determination showing through his pain. “Fuck off.”

Stella raised her eyebrows. “Is that ‘fuck off, I enjoy getting shot and I hope you’ll do it again,’ or ‘fuck off, I’m out of my mind with pain and don’t know what I’m saying?’ ”

The boy just frowned and stared at the ground.

Chrissy kicked him, hard, below the hole in his leg. He made a sound that wasn’t like anything Stella had heard from a human before.

“How do you like that, dirtbag?” Chrissy said, winding up to do it again.

“Hang on there, sweetie,” Stella said, laying a hand on her shoulder. She crouched down to look the boy in the eye.

“Now I understand you got your reasons for not wanting to talk to me,” she told him. “If my boss was some kind of kingpin or what have you, I guess I’d be worried myself. I wouldn’t be in any hurry to spill the beans. In fact, you’re probably sitting there thinking your odds with us are better than with the rest of those clowns. Am I right?”

The boy didn’t say anything, but he gave the muscles around his mouth a workout.

“So that makes it our job to convince you that isn’t the case. You look at me, you probably see a wrinkly middle-aged woman your mom’s age. You think—”

She paused. At the mention of his mom, there had been something—a little blip of emotion that flashed across his eyes. Stella reconsidered her approach.

“Were you one of the ones that nailed me the other night?” Stella kept her voice pleasant as she fixed the knots in place.

When he didn’t answer, she gave Chrissy a tiny nod, and the girl toed his leg again. Not as hard, but enough to make him grunt with pain. Sweat beads had popped up along his forehead. He worked his lips a bit and then muttered, “No.”

“What’s your name?”

“Patrick.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen.” His voice hitched, ending in a bit of a squeak. Hell, bound up like that he looked about as threatening as a teddy bear. “What’d you do to the dogs?”

“Killed ’em,” Chrissy said. “Shot ’em, and it didn’t bother me a bit. I think I might have got me a taste for shooting things.”

Stella glanced up at the cold steel in Chrissy’s voice.

“I am looking for a little boy,” Chrissy continued. “My son is missing. He is eighteen months old. I want him back. It’s not right, him being away from his mother. Now, do you know anything about him?”

Patrick squeezed his eyes shut and grimaced from the pain.

“You know mothers,” Stella said conversationally. “Chrissy here’s actually a nice lady most of the time. Wouldn’t swat a fly. But get between her and her boy and… whoo, I tell ya, I’m not sure I like your odds. I bet your mama’s the same way. I bet if she knew who you were working for, she’d probably hightail it out here and take old Funzi’s head off. Am I right?”

Genuine anguish seeped into the boy’s eyes. “You’re wrong. It’s a family thing. We’re related. Funzi’s her cousin. Look, my dad took off when I was little, okay? I got three little sisters. Funzi’s just helping us out.”

Stella prodded him again, a little harder. The wound, which was down to a trickle of blood, gave up a small gush. “You think your mama would appreciate this kind of help? Huh? Do you?”

Though Patrick’s face had gone chalk white, he kept to his stony silence.

“You’re telling me your mama handed you over to Funzi? Told him, forget finishing high school, forget college, I prefer you take my boy and teach him how to maim and kill, please?”

“I can’t cross him. I don’t care what you say.” The boy’s breath was ragged. “He’ll kill me. He’ll kill me slow.”

Man, it was worse than Stella thought. If Funzi’d got the kid running this scared, he must be the genuine, ruthless, bloody-handed mob article. She wasn’t sure how to convince the boy she was every bit as much of a badass threat as Funzi.

Because, in the end, she wasn’t. There was no way she was going to kill this man-child with peach fuzz growing on his upper lip.

As Stella hesitated, Chrissy shouldered her out of the way and leaned in hard on Patrick, her face just inches from his. “I don’t know if your mama’s a nice lady or not. I don’t know her, period. That’s why I can drive over there and start hurting her bad. If I knew her. I might have second thoughts, but I’m not even going to give her time to offer me a glass of tea. First thing I’m going to do is shoot her just like Stella done you, see? Except she don’t have anything useful to tell me, so I don’t know if I’ll really take the time to tie her off so she don’t bleed out. Aw, hell, I know it’ll take a long time to lose enough blood from a hole here—”she jabbed Patrick hard in the skin an inch from the bullet’s entry—“so I might just have to aim a little higher. There’s some artery in the thigh I guess pumps a lot of blood, the, what do you call it—”

“Femoral,” Stella said softly.

“Femoral, yeah,” Chrissy said. Then she drew back slowly, never taking her eyes off the boy’s face.

He gulped. Hard. And Stella knew they had him.

“I’ll tell you what I know,” he wheezed. “You stay the hell away from my mom. Funzi’s got your kid. For his wife.”

There was a moment of shocked silence.

“What are you talking about?” Chrissy demanded.

“Roy Dean gave him to Funzi, okay? He and his wife couldn’t have kids. Been trying forever. Roy Dean said you wouldn’t care.”

Chrissy’s eyes narrowed. “He said what?” she demanded, and Stella grabbed her arm before she could do the boy any more damage.

“He said you never did want that kid in the first place.” The boy squeezed his eyes shut tight, a sheen of perspiration dampening his forehead. “Said he was an accident and all. He like… said you wanted to give him up for adoption… that he was doing you a favor.”

Stella could feel Chrissy start to shake and clamped her hand down harder. “Easy there, girl,” she murmured. “Easy. Whatever’s happened, it ain’t this boy’s fault.”

Chrissy shone her flashlight directly in Patrick’s eyes, causing him to squeeze them shut. “Where’d Funzi take my Tucker?”

“I don’t know, okay, I don’t know! Probably the lake house, Mrs. Angelini spends most of the summer there.”

“What lake house?”

“They got a place in that new development down by Camden Beach, you know? About thirty-five miles from here.”

“Tucker’s with Funzi’s wife? You’re sure?” Stella asked, thinking fast. If Patrick was telling the truth, and